


pieces

by pensee



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Abusive and toxic relationship, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Amputation, Anal Sex, Begging, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Hand Jobs, Infection, Jealousy, M/M, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Linear Narrative, Not a Love Story, Obsession, Oral Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:07:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23888680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensee/pseuds/pensee
Summary: A harmless text or two wouldn’t hurt him, right?A harmless text had turned into an irritated phone call a week later, Hannibal wondering why Will had stopped replying. He had phoned under the guise of checking if Will was in good health, though Will could hear the almost predatory tension in his voice when he all but insisted that he come over to check on him, despite Will saying he was absolutely fine.Will didn’t have any particular reason for not texting him back. It had slipped his mind, and Hannibal hadn’t sent him anything before the phone call, so he’d also figured the other man had let it go as well.Still, when Hannibal showed up on his doorstep a few hours later, home-cooked meal in hand, Will should’ve known there was something wrong.-Hannibal knows when he's found something good, and he'll do anything to keep it.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 14
Kudos: 136





	pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Please check the endnotes for a more detailed description of the content herein, but know that this is not a story with a happy ending. There is no major character death, but the ending is not the best possibility for these two, so keep that in mind. Hannibal is an abuser, plain and simple. There are no redeeming characteristics about him.
> 
> As stated by the title, this story contains vignettes that compose a larger idea, rather than a fully continuous narrative, and the non-linear tag really applies here.

Hannibal’s therapist is impatient today, and Hannibal crosses one leg over the other, watching him fidget.

“So, in this dream—This dream about your mother. What happens?”

Taking his time, Hannibal says, pretending to consider, “Well, she is on a bed. Sometimes my bed, sometimes the bed she shared with my father.

“Her mouth is stitched shut, and still, she tries to scream.”

“Can you discern words…or?” His therapist is grasping for something sensitive, something socially appropriate to say. Hannibal sees a bead of sweat travel down the side of his neck and soak into his collar.

“No. She stops screaming when I take the saw to her arms.”

“Maybe she’s in too much pain. The body can only take so much.”

Hannibal watches as the doctor across from him crosses and re-crosses his ankles.

“I’m aware. She starts moaning—like a dying animal—when I cut into her legs.”

“That’s what she is in this fantasy, Hannibal. I mean, you couldn’t expect her to survive without anesthesia or tourniquets!”

“I realize that. And I’ve never called it a fantasy, merely a recurring dream.”

His therapist shifts, uncomfortable at this assessment.

“So, what do you think of my dream, doctor? Other than the fact that you think I am treating this violent imagery about my mother like a fantasy.”

The other man’s jaw clenches.

“Oh, I don’t know, Hannibal. You’re familiar with the psychodynamic explanations—Not that I buy into Freud, I know better.”

Hannibal’s expression remains blank.

“Christ. I think—You _know_ what I think. I think you love your mother a little too much.”

Hannibal thinks of blood spilling over white sheets, of stitched lips, and wide eyes.

“Love?” he says.

The maid goes into the garden, trembling, but collects herself as best she can. She needs to harvest tomatoes and eggplant for dinner, but she must also weed out the parasitic vines that cling to the trees and replenish the seed in the bird feeders that sprinkle the property before her preparations in the kitchen. The Lady of the house normally feeds the birds, though she has not been feeling well, stricken with the same malady that had sent the gardener to the biggest hospital in Vilnius the week before.

While digging through the soil for slugs and snails to discard, she finds the drawing she had creased and hidden in her bedside table, intending to feed it to the fire in the great hall before Nanny had distracted her and called her to do something else. She sobs softly, saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth as she feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

She sees herself—her eyes dead, head lolling to the ceiling—in the bath, wet hair spilling over her shoulders as she stares into nothingness, posed against the tub like the eponymous revolutionary in the _Death of Marat_.

The fact that a child’s hand had created a work so gruesome and so realistic does not strike her then; all she knows is that the piece of paper is as good as a threat.

“You didn’t like my gift, Maria?”

Her head whips around, and she sees a little dark-haired boy standing at the threshold to the kitchens. She calls him little, for he is still this way in her mind, though he has grown to half a man before her eyes. Though she is only twenty-five, he will always be a child—fearsome as he is—to her.

“Master,” she says. “I-I was going to ask you about—”

“No,” he says, dismissive. “You were going to hide it away until you had the chance to destroy it. Don’t lie to me.”

“W-why did you bury your drawing in the garden? Where you k-knew I’d find it?” she asks, hand around her small garden sickle, though it does not feel like much protection against his piercing red eyes.

“I _wanted_ you to find it, of course.”

“Son, what are you doing out there? Did you want to help me feed the birds?”

Maria near collapses in relief when she hears her Lady’s wavering voice, the woman emerging to hover in the doorway alongside her quietly monstrous brood.

“I was telling Maria not to crush the snails for the birds to have. I can keep them in my collection.”

“Such a sweet boy, saving those defenseless creatures. Even if they do ruin our lettuce crop,” Lady Simonetta says in Italian, and if she could understand the language, Maria would likely gag at the sentiment found therein.

“I would love to help you feed the birds, Mother,” the boy says, his eyes not leaving Maria for an instant.

Will can’t believe he used to find the drawings sexy.

He’d been poking around Hannibal’s study with the same exacting eye Hannibal had admitted to while exploring Will’s own home, opening cabinets and drawers, leafing through a handful of shelved, rarely-read books.

“What the hell are these?” he’d asked, tone too light for the subject matter, looking at various graphite depictions of himself twisted into impossible positions, leaking blood and bile from his mouth and from various surgically crafted orifices. Always with an expression on his face that was halfway between agony and bliss, as if there wasn’t a certain point where the brain gave up and confused the two.

He’d been holding a drawing where he’d been missing both arms, and Hannibal had come up behind him, wrapped his own around him. Put his chin on Will’s shoulder, and chuckled, like a big, bad wolf in a fairy tale.

“Do you like them,” he’d said, his intonation flat. He’d already known Will would like them, be flattered in his own way. That’s why he’d been careless, left them in plain sight, tucked beneath a medical text on his drawing desk.

“You didn’t draw in any prosthetics,” Will had observed, distracted by Hannibal’s warm, broad hands on his belly.

“You wouldn’t need them,” Hannibal had said. “I’d take care of everything for you.”

And Will, like an idiot, had believed he’d been joking, that they’d found something new, something even more appealing in the darker corners of whatever this was between them.

Will, like an idiot, had _believed_ him.

Will has the one hand left, now, so he’s still able to jerk Hannibal off the way he likes—and put his mouth on him besides—beneath the protective shadow of a shaded cabana.

They’re on a beach that Will doesn’t know the name of, somewhere in South America, and Hannibal is pulsing hot in his mouth, so much that he feels it bubble up and overflow into his nasal cavity before he can choke it all down. A nasty white bubble drips out of his nose, but Will’s hand is still on the base of Hannibal’s cock, and he doesn’t have enough leverage to lift himself up and free without it.

Hannibal presses a cloth napkin to his face and mops up the mess, grabs him under his armpits, careful of the stump of his left arm, and helps him recline on the pillows next to him.

“Thank you, Fernando,” he hears Hannibal say, as a young man who is handsome enough to be a runway model hands Hannibal a drink and a platter of thinly sliced strawberries, bows, and departs with a low, “You’re welcome, señor.”

Fernando has already seen Will in much worse condition than this in the past few days, and is used to men who treat their pets with far less respect than Hannibal treats Will.

“You like him,” Will says, trying to keep the accusation out of his voice. It’s a moot point whether or not Hannibal does, because he’s the one with the money and the four limbs with which to do with it whatever he pleases. But still. Hannibal owes him a little loyalty.

“I enjoy looking at pretty things,” Hannibal says, not quite an admission, and no steel to his voice.

Today is a good day, Will decides, and opens his mouth obediently for Hannibal to place the fruit on his tongue.

There’d been an infection, once.

Infection that turned to sepsis before Hannibal could stop it, and Will had landed himself in the hospital without even knowing it, had been driven there through the haze of fever and chills.

“You’re lucky your husband came home in time,” a nurse tells him, when he wakes up three days later. “He kept telling us you thought it was just a normal fever, that you didn’t want to trouble anyone by going to the doctor. If he’d been a few hours later, you might not have made it.”

The nurse does not ask about Will’s missing arm, or why he has twin scars above his diaphragm, where Hannibal had taken two of his ribs. Hannibal swore the effect had pinched in his waist a whole two inches, but Will hadn’t bought it as anything more than an excuse to take a couple more.

Not all abusers leave you black and blue, he thinks, and turns away from the nurse when she asks if he wants some water.

Hannibal walks in a moment later, and Will can smell the cup of coffee in his hands.

“Would you have taken mercy on me if I’d begged, the first time? Instead of just…letting you do it?”

Will knows that he hadn’t _let_ Hannibal do anything, but that’s not the point.

The second time had been different, the realization of that sketch he’d found what seemed like years ago, of him becoming the thing that had needed Hannibal to take care of him, to take care of everything. Hannibal had decided to let him keep one arm, but told Will of his plans to remove both of his legs instead.

Tears in his eyes, fear-snot clogging his nose, he’d pleaded _no, no, no, I changed my mind, I changed my mind, let the drugs wear off, you don’t have to do this, Hannibal, please—_

That had been two whole limbs ago, though, and Will thought of it differently now. He just wanted to know if Hannibal did.

“When have you ever known me to be merciful, darling?” Hannibal asks, and presses a kiss to the back of his hand. They’re watching the waves crash onto the shore, and the moonlight covers his face in a brilliant sheen for a moment, before he once again settles back in his own chair and disappears into shadow, the reflection of light in his eyes the only thing that Will can see.

Alana had introduced them at the BAU’s annual Christmas party.

Will had trusted her judgment (she was cautious when it came to his mental well-being and was aware of his disparaging opinions on shrinks), and hadn’t understood that she’d been starry-eyed over Hannibal since they’d been on-and-off fucking since he was her mentor all those years ago.

“Hannibal, this is Will,” she’d said, red lips split around a blinding smile.

“You must be in the mental health business,” Will had said, not looking Hannibal in the eye and not bothering to take his extended hand. “Alana only mutes someone’s credentials if she thinks it’ll offend my…delicate sensibilities.”

“You’re the talk of this party, though Alana hasn’t told me anything about you before tonight,” Hannibal had said, and he’d sounded honest enough, even to the extensive breadth of Will’s imagination, that Will had stopped short.

“Oh,” he’d said, foregoing the apology. If this Hannibal was really such a good guy, he wouldn’t get a bee in his bonnet about a little rudeness.

By the end of the party, they’d been laughing over drinks, Will a bit tipsy and Hannibal too clever with a metaphor about Will being Uncle Jack’s fine china.

I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, Will had thought to himself, and that feeling had been, for once in his miserable life: nothing at all.

He’d been quick to form opinions— _not worth my time, nice but bland, inflated opinion of himself, someone needed to lay off the self-help books_ —but he could not classify Doctor Hannibal Lecter as someone to approach or as someone to avoid, and he supposed the novelty had been what made him trade numbers with the other man.

A harmless text or two wouldn’t hurt him, right?

A harmless text had turned into an irritated phone call a week later, Hannibal wondering why Will had stopped replying. He had phoned under the guise of checking if Will was in good health, though Will could hear the almost predatory tension in his voice when he all but insisted that he come over to check on him, despite Will saying he was absolutely fine.

Will didn’t have any particular reason for not texting him back. It had slipped his mind, and Hannibal hadn’t sent him anything before the phone call, so he’d also figured the other man had let it go as well.

Still, when Hannibal showed up on his doorstep a few hours later, home-cooked meal in hand, Will should’ve known there was something wrong.

Hannibal likes to fuck him with his face suffocating in their pillows, and Will doesn’t know whether he likes it this way, though his body does, his cock hard against the bed as Hannibal ruts into him like an animal claiming its mate.

What’s left of his legs always aches after, though Hannibal massages them and the arm that’s tense from holding himself up so he doesn’t smother.

Will’s never thought much about how he looks, not even when Hannibal tells him things like, “You’re the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

Now, he studies the veins on the back of his remaining hand, the greenish tint of their branches on the skin of his inner wrist and forearm, looks at the bruised hollows beneath his eyes on nights he cannot sleep, and thinks of being carried from place to place when Hannibal wants to move him, thinks of how tightly he clings.

Thinks of how Hannibal doesn’t call him _person_ , thinks of how he calls him _thing_.

Climbing out of the pool, still dripping water over the sandstone beneath him, Hannibal watches Will turning brown in the sun.

Picking up his towel, he spreads it over the padded chaise next to Will and sits down on the lounger, running water-cool fingers over a longish curl and tucking it behind Will’s ear.

It was time for Will to be turned so he could lay on his front and tan more evenly, but he was sleeping and Hannibal didn’t want to disturb him, sweet as he looked with his skin smeared with oil and a small towel covering his naked groin.

Hannibal thinks of various tokens he’s given potential sweethearts over the years, thinks of the maid he tormented as a boy, burying her picture in the garden for her to find.

None of them, for all their beauty or oddity or diminutive nature, could compare to Will.

_So many failed attempts, and I’ve finally found something that’s all mine._

Will scrambles up in his chair when he realizes that he’s being watched. Just coming out of sleep, his body thinking it has its limbs again, he shoots upright using only his right hand for balance, with much less effort than it usually takes.

“What are you looking at?” he says, suspicious, though his cheeks are bright and not from the sun.

“You,” Hannibal smiles.

Will had been a well-respected teacher, once upon a time.

Slideshow on the big projector in his lecture hall, he’d talked at students and had told them how to go out into the world and face the darkness that Nietzsche warned against becoming in their noble quest to fight the evils that lurked in the shadows and disguised themselves in the light.

“Look at the person in front of and behind you. Do you know their name? Do you trust them?

“If you’re going to be efficient in the field—If you’re going to be _safe_ in the field, you need to learn to trust your partner. To communicate with them. To rely on them, when you can’t rely on anyone else.”

“What was your experience like in the field, as a homicide detective, Professor?” a student had asked—a fresh-faced girl from Georgia whose name Will had not, in fact, known.

He’d made a private face to himself and had instead steered the conversation back towards simulated hostage situation drills in Hogan’s Alley.

Hannibal had met him for dinner after the late afternoon lesson, and had driven Will to a restaurant that looked imposing, but was really a nice family-owned place that happened to find investors in some of Baltimore’s more elite circles.

A rotund grandmother who was keeper of the secret recipes had joked with him and whispered some of those secrets in his ear, and he had no longer been mad that this was the third time Hannibal had demanded he be social that week.

“You’re pushing my boundaries,” he’d said, flirtatious, like he wasn’t looking into a demon’s maw and asking to be swallowed whole.

“And you appreciate them being pushed,” Hannibal had grinned, Will shrugging and tapping his shoe against Hannibal’s oxford beneath the table.

“Maybe I do.”

Hannibal had reminded him of this later, made for him Grandma’s Secret Bolognese, the day after he’d cut Will’s arm.

They’d been vacationing in Paris when Will met Dimmond.

It had been their first anniversary, and Hannibal had surprised him. Will hadn’t asked why he’d disappeared halfway through the party Hannibal had insisted they attend, later learning—with a bone saw halfway through his arm and Anthony Dimmond long digested, of course—that it was because his initial surprise plans had gone awry, and that Hannibal had needed time to fix it.

He’d been chatting with a woman too enchanted with his pretty face to admit defeat when Anthony had first approached, cutting into the conversation like a hot knife through butter.

“Care for another?” he’d asked, plucking Will’s half empty drink from his hands and replacing it with something quite a bit more top-shelf.

“I’m Anthony Dimmond,” he’d said, and Will had not missed how much they physically resembled one another. Perhaps Hannibal would like a bit of a treat, if he’d found the party boring enough to duck out without letting Will know where he was going.

“Thanks for the drink, Anthony Dimmond,” Will had said, pouring the American pronunciation on thick. Instead of irritating Dimmond, it had amused.

“What’s a pretty thing like you doing here alone?”

“Hopefully something more interesting now that you’re here.”

Will had left Hannibal a message about meeting someone at the party and going to a patisserie for food and cappuccino on the way home. It had been their anniversary; Hannibal couldn’t be too angry at him for skipping out on a party _he_ didn’t even want to attend.

Hannibal had found them back at the apartment, gorging themselves on something stuffed with marzipan, Will turning at the scrape of his key in the door.

“Baby, why weren’t you picking up your phone? I called three times.”

“You brought a guest,” Hannibal had said, with a charmed expression that did not reach his eyes.

“Is that a problem?” Will had asked, hands on the stem of his champagne glass, knowing Hannibal would have something to say about Will opening it without him. But it served him right, for abandoning him like that earlier.

“No,” Hannibal had said, approaching like a looming cloud. “No problem at all.”

“You don’t _really_ like Fernando, do you?” he asks, thinking of the beach server in his own place as Hannibal stretches out on the chaise next to him and feeling a disgusting amount of stomach-curdling hatred for the young boy before Hannibal dismisses his fears with a snort.

“ _Who_?” Hannibal asks, and Will pokes him on the cheek at the feigned ignorance, tries not to laugh when Hannibal leans over to kiss him, his body blocking out the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a scene in Cari Mora (Thomas Harris’s most recent novel, in which the protagonist is depicted in a sketch with only one remaining limb). In this story, Hannibal does this to Will. 
> 
> Hannibal also recounts a violent, non-sexual fantasy about his mother (which he makes up to unnerve his therapist). 
> 
> I tried to keep my tenses consistent (everything in the past was in the past perfect tense and everything in the present was in the present tense), but any mistakes are my own. The section with Dimmond is where Hannibal first committed to removing Will’s arm, and it spiraled from there.


End file.
